There should be a 20 cent levy on shopping bags at supermarkets?

Reasons To Disagree

This cost will only be passed on to the consumer and for many the price of groceries is high enough. I agree that we should be using reusable bags. More positive reasons need to be offerd to use reusable bags rather than trying to punish some one. Positive incentives are always the best way to go, punishment should always be a last resort.

The cost of bags would simply be absorbed in teh overall proce of products and it is teh consumer that needs to change its activities, not the retailer. If the costs can be seperated and identified to the consumer during payment then there may be a chance however the cost must be high enough to affect behaviour thus effectively a penalty.

A socialist question!

Another rise?

WHY? WHAT FOR? TAX _ TAX _ TAX!!! Virtually every question so far has been a suggestion to impose a tax or a cost. The greenies - if they had their way - would ensure that nobody had any money left in their pocket to do anything.

Reasons To Agree

It would be great to see NZ do something to back up its clean green image and would be a solid start to tackling the threat of climate change. Check out this site for further info: www.bagtax.org.nz

The effect in Ireland was that 90% of shopping bags disappeared... 20 cents spread across 10 items in a bag, is only going to increase the spend by approximately 2cents per item. What i can't understand is why checkout operators put 3 litre orange juice bottles in their own bags.. they don't really need bags... All in all tho, its the plastic used in packaging that is more harmful that the plastic bags themselves... In Netherlands the government mandated that shops must pay about $1 for returned bottles... now this cost was only passed on to the customer once, however it gave a very good incentive to everyone to recycle.

only if the "supermarket" has to pay for them, so it would force them to use (hopefully) strong paper or reusable bags instead.

yep, if one had to pay for all those free plastic bags, we would all be buying our calico ones en mass and plastic bags would disapear for ever - never had them when I was grown up and we managed

plastic shopping bags, not reusable ones

I use boxes anyway